Borrego Springs

I spent my teen years at the foot of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon and now live on a bluff overlooking the rolling Pacific, yet it is only in the desert - with its dry, sage-scented air and spacious solitude - that I feel at home. The desert is where I go when I need to think, or stop thinking. The desert is hidden. The desert reveals itself slowly, like a lover.

Your article "Seven Decades of Rex Brandt" (Jan. 20) is an example of the whole story missing in journalism. While purporting to cover Rex Brandt's life, the author, Kenny Littlefield, focuses on Brandt's beloved Newport Beach with paintings of the harbor, wind and boats and his design of the official seal of the city of Newport Beach. Rex Brandt ventured into the desert too, as the enclosed photo of his painting of my cabin and water tower in Borrego Springs, Calif., shows. I wish the author would have covered the whole story of Rex Brandt, not just his beloved Newport Beach.

May 3, 1998 | PATRICK GOLDSTEIN, Goldstein is an entertainment writer for The Times

It's hard to imagine a more spectacular way of getting your first glimpse of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park than by swooping down out of the clouds in a power dive, leaving behind the piney plateau of the Cleveland National Forest as you descend 3,200 feet to the dry sandy plain of the desert. Best of all, you don't even need to charter a plane.

April 16, 1995 | JIM HOLLANDER, TIMES STAFF WRITER; Hollander is a Times copy editor

One of the biggest achievements in my life was getting my wife to admit that there is an alternative to camping in the Sierra. Not that sleeping under a canopy of royal sequoias isn't a near-religious experience. And I sure wouldn't want to ruffle John Muir's feathers. But after her first trip to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Leslie confided that her Northern California-bred instinct to turn up her nose at the sandy, arid environs of the state's southern half was shortsighted.